Hand car washes allow users great flexibility in washing their cars. Whereas automated car washes lack hand carried wands, have large and quite expensive installations and may damage custom equipment on vehicles that pass through them, hand car washes have a hand carried wand and nozzle which allows a user to leave their vehicle, pick up the wand, and direct a jet of high pressure water at their car manually. This allows user to avoid delicate areas of the car, and allows the user to focus on particularly dirty areas.
The typical hand car wash wand is simply an elongated nozzle with a pistol grip for convenient use. Some may have a shut-off valve allowing the user to halt or reduce water flow, and some may allow the user to dispense soap.
However, hand car washes do not offer the ability to dry the vehicle conveniently. In general, the user of a hand car wash is expected to drive the wet vehicle away and allow it air dry in the wind of its own motion. However, this had notable disadvantages, in particular, the wet moving vehicle accumulates dust as it goes, defeating the purpose of the car wash.
An entirely different technology is the installation type car wash in which the user drives into an automated or human-occupied bay and the car is washed either by people or by mechanical devices. Such mechanical devices are quite expensive and must of necessity be larger than the vehicle to be washed. Because the automated bays are so large, it is possible to provide massive blowing machinery to dry the vehicle as it exits.
However, many vehicles must be hand washed by the owner and thus cannot go through automated bays. Vehicles with holes in the top that would allow water in, vehicles with special exterior equipment and so on all must be washed by the owner or another person, and this means use of the normal car wash wand.
Thus it would be advantageous to provide a hand carried car wash wand which may be used for drying a vehicle being washed, in whole or in part.